Bill Gurley and Jack Altman back the startup Pursuit, which helps companies sell to the government

Mike Vecchich grew up in Michigan. He remembers that his family dedicated their lives to public service. His parents were teachers, his uncle was a fighter pilot, and his grandparents served in the military. “Growing up, public service was always a really great way to spend one’s life and career,” he told TechCrunch. “I have three young children. I want them to grow up in a country where the government can get things done.”

He went into consulting, then launched a consumer company that he sold to Olo for $200 million in 2021. After his wife gave birth to their third son, he and Brandon Max, the founding engineer at his latest startup, began discussing what they wanted to do in this next chapter of their careers.

Every idea they came up with came down to one thing: that it was too difficult to sell to the government. “We were like, maybe there’s something to that.” In 2023, they launched Pursuit, a site that helps companies find and win government contracts. On Wednesday, it announced a $22 million seed round led by Mike Rosengarten, co-founder of OpenGov. The company has raised $25.5 million in funding to date from investors such as Jack Altman (then at Alt Capital), Bill Gurley, and Sam Hinkie at 87 Capital.

Pursuit works by constantly reading public data from about 11,000 state, local, and public education (SLED) entities, meaning its AI systems are crawling budgets, contract records, FIOA records, and request for proposals from every state, school district, county, city, and special district across the country, Vecchich explained. “We turn fragmented public data into fully considered opportunities,” he said.

SLED then shows which agencies are most likely to purchase certain services for Pursuit clients over the next year, based on signals like their budget, the issues they face, and who is responsible.

A customer is any company that sells to public service agencies, he said, describing Pursuit as “an AI clone of themselves, making sure they know everything that happens across every account in their patch.”

Others in this space include Starbridge, GovSpend, and Deltek GovWin IQ.

Vichich said he hopes Pursuit will help make SLED contract opportunities more transparent and accessible. “The data has always been publicly available, and that’s the irony,” he said. It’s just that this data is buried across thousands and thousands of websites, and lost in PDF files and meeting videos.

He continued: “The cost of finding and analyzing them has historically been very high compared to the value of any signal contract.” “Pursuit is the layer that turns sunlight into something useful.”